In a hospital or a caring facility, it is necessary to move a patient, a cared person, or the like (hereinafter, referred to as a “cared person” or the like) from a state lying on a bed in a hospital room to another place many times in one day. In this case, upon transferring the patient, the cared person, or the like, from the bed onto, for example, a wheel chair, normally, this job is manually carried out by a nurse, a care giver, or the like, with a result that much physical load is imposed on the nurse, the care giver, or the like.
In order to reduce such physical load and also lighten such a transferring job, a bed has been proposed in which a part of a mat portion of a bed is separated and is utilized also as a wheel chair (for example, see Japanese Unexamined Utility Model Publication No. 5-51330).
FIG. 17 is a perspective view that shows a schematic structure of a bed apparatus according to Japanese Unexamined Utility Model Publication No. 5-51330. The bed apparatus of Japanese Unexamined Utility Model Publication No. 5-51330 has a structure in which a mat plate forming a mat portion of the bed is divided into three portions in a width direction of a bed main body 1, and a center mat plate 2 located in the center of the mat plate is separated from the bed main body 1 together with a cart 3 so as to be utilized also as a transferring wheel chair. Upon separating and taking out the center mat plate 2 from the bed main body 1 together with the cart 3, a side mat plate 4 on one side of the paired side mat plates 4 that sandwich the center mat plate 2 is moved upward from the bed main body 1 by a rotation mechanism 5 installed in the bed main body 1, so that this movement allows the side mat plate 4 to retreat.
With this structure, by simply taking and putting the cart 3 out of and into the bed main body 1 with the side mat plate 4 on one side being raised, the center mat plate 2 can be separated from the bed main body 1 and returned to its original position. Therefore, this structure makes it possible to easily carry out jobs of separating the portion forming a wheel chair from the bed main body 1 and joining the portion to the bed main body 1 swiftly, with a cared person or the like being carried thereon.
In the conventional art described above, however, when the center mat plate 2 and the cart 3 are separated as a wheel chair (or joined to the bed main body), the side mat plate 4 is moved upward to retreat from the bed main body 1. For this reason, issues arise in which, upon or after retreating, a person lying on the bed or the wheel chair receives an oppressive feeling by the retreating side mat plate 4, and in which in a case where the retreating is insufficient, there may be a risk of collision of the person with the side mat plate 4.
Moreover, in most cases, the caring or hospital-use bed is required for providing a back-raised or leg-raised posture state; however, since the above-mentioned conventional bed is not provided by taking the back-raised and leg-raised posture states into consideration, much load is sometimes applied to the cared person or the like, resulting in an issue in which functions as the caring or hospital-use bed are not sufficiently satisfied.